The Palestinians

After Arafat

The Palestinians are approaching a moment of truth

HISTORY may judge him an arch-terrorist, a national hero or both. What nobody can deny is that for all the lip-service carefully paid to the outward forms of collective leadership, Yasser Arafat has never been one to share real power. All the Palestinians' big decisions—most fatefully his decision at the end of 2000 not to grab the peace compromise put together after the Camp David summit by then president Bill Clinton—were in the end his alone. For that reason, this week's sudden decline in his health cannot be seen only as a moment of crisis for the people of Palestine. Though they now face a troubling question—how will they remain united if their paramount leader dies?—they also have an opportunity. If he were to die, Mr Arafat's passing might be the event that frees them from the trap in which they have put themselves since the eruption four years ago of their second intifada against Israel.

On paper, the Palestinians have a plan of sorts for the succession (see article). But, thanks to the complicated tricks history has played on the Palestinians, nobody else can easily fill the vacuum Mr Arafat will leave behind.

Like the Jews, Palestinians are a dispersed people, divided into groups that want different things from peace. Some of the millions of people who feel Palestinian are citizens of Israel or Jordan. Others have endured nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Still more are stateless refugees in Lebanon, Syria and beyond. Mr Arafat's singular achievement is to have become, for all of them, the personification of the Palestinian cause. But to do so he shied away from the hard decisions needed to end the conflict, such as accepting that in any peace based on sharing Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, the Palestinians displaced by Israel's founding nearly 60 years ago will never return.

One grim possibility on Mr Arafat's death is therefore that the divisions in Palestinian ranks will come to the fore, making the prospects for peace even worse. The hard-line Islamists of Hamas, already strong in the Gaza strip, may feel less constrained about mounting an open challenge to Mr Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement. On the West Bank, the lid may blow off a long-simmering generational struggle between the elderly ideologists who came home from exile in Tunis at the beginning of the 1990s and the younger and more pragmatic leaders who grew up under Israeli occupation and organised the first intifada. A Palestine at war with itself might then be even less able than it is at present to cut a deal with Israel.

There is, however, a brighter possibility. The death of Mr Arafat could at a stroke deprive Israel of the reason—some would say the excuse—it has given over the past two years for suspending negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. The Israelis have refused to talk peace with a man they accuse of encouraging and even conniving in the suicide bombers' mass murder of their civilians. If after Arafat the Palestinians rise to the occasion by producing a leadership able and willing to honour its ceasefire commitments under the international “road map”, this impasse might at last be broken—and the unilateral withdrawal that Ariel Sharon is planning from Gaza might then become connected to a negotiated agreement embracing the West Bank too. The world should do what it can to promote such an outcome. But a great deal now depends on the unity and pragmatism of the Palestinians themselves.